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Overview

Professional football today is an $8 billion sports entertainment industry-and the most popular spectator sport in America, with designs on expansion across the globe. In this astute field-level view of the National Football League since 1960, Michael Oriard looks closely at the development of the sport and at the image of the NFL and its unique place in American life. New to the paperback edition is Oriard's analysis of the offseason labor negotiations and their potential effects on the future of the sport, and his account of how the NFL is dealing with the latest research on concussions and head injuries.

What People Are Saying

From the Publisher

"Only an offensive center could have written this book! Michael Oriard is detailed, conscientious, and accurate. The details of NFL labor strife are on the mark, and will hopefully dispel much of the mystery about the early days of NFLPA leadership. This is the most comprehensive document of NFL growth I have seen."—Bill Curry

"Brand NFL is the definitive account of America's most compelling sport. Michael Oriard's book is at once a powerful story and an erudite history, told by a writer whose authority is equaled by his flair."—Sally Jenkins, sports columnist, The Washington Post

"Oriard, a former pro player and current professor, makes the epic tale of the NFL's touchdown drive from tainted image to powerhouse brand as intensely exciting as a Sunday game on a highlight reel."—Robert Lipsyte, contributing writer, The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Brand NFL is the definitive account of America's most compelling sport. Michael Oriard's book is at once a powerful story and an erudite history, told by a writer whose authority is equaled by his flair.--Sally Jenkins, sports columnist, The Washington Post

[A] thoughtful, informative overview. . . . Oriard wonders whether the NFL may have gained the whole world but lost, or at least compromised, its soul. . . . The combination of [Oriard's] playing experience and his deep knowledge of the league's inner business workings makes for a unique and useful point of view. . . . In the end Oriard, for all his toughness, reveals himself to be something of a romantic. . . . Oriard is right to insist that if pro football permits the essential nature of the game to be lost in all that marketing, if it becomes all sizzle and no steak, something very American and very valuable also will be lost.--Washington Post Book World

Oriard, a former pro player and current professor, makes the epic tale of the NFL's touchdown drive from tainted image to powerhouse brand as intensely exciting as a Sunday game on a highlight reel.--Robert Lipsyte, contributing writer, The New York Times

Oriard speaks about football from a unique perspective: an academic who has plied his trade in the trenches. His new book, Brand NFL tackles the game's racial politics, labor disputes, and big-bucks marketing campaigns with candor and pungent critiques.--Chronicle of Higher Education

Jonathan Yardley

[Oriard] is scarcely the first former player to write about the game—Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay (1968), published while its author was still a member of the Green Bay Packers, remains to this day the best book about football qua football—but the combination of his playing experience and his deep knowledge of the league's inner business workings makes for a unique and useful point of view. Much of the material in the first two-thirds of the book will be familiar to readers of Michael MacCambridge's America's Game (2004), the best history of pro football to date, but his discussion of what can fairly be called the game's larger meaning is especially interesting and insightful.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

The National Football League is more than a collection of well-sculpted athletes; it is a business colossus that has mastered marketing and features media- savvy players, and owners who have taken full advantage of corporate sponsorship. Oriard, a former NFL offensive lineman in the 1970s and now a university professor, examines how the NFL became a business titan, examining the effects of such landmark events as the 1960 hiring of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and how the 1993 labor agreement between the players and owners made the league's economic structure more stable and thus much more lucrative. Oriard sometimes gets off track in detailing the league's rise to iconic status, but even his diversions on the players' struggles with owners and how racial stereotyping (even when black quarterbacks are no longer an anomaly) still colors the game are enlightening and well researched. With his casual humor and refreshing lack of academic-speak, Oriard has fashioned a riveting examination of how a violent sport has become a staggering mainstream American success. (Sept.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Library Journal

This erudite study of the financial and cultural behemoth that is the NFL is worthy of a doctoral dissertation, something Oriard already has under his belt as a professor of American literature at Oregon State University. As he was a "gridiron gladiator" for the Kansas City Chiefs, his obvious passion and in-depth knowledge of all facets of this now-dominant sport come as no surprise. The resulting analysis is detailed, compelling, and strangely fascinating as the author succeeds in explaining in commonplace language the complex machinations of the game's owners, coaches, and players, notably on the labor front, without neglecting the pervasive role played by television, the emerging racial fault lines of professional football, the headline-grabbing thuggish and aberrant behavior of many players, the cultural hyperbole and media saturation associated with the Super Bowl, and the outrageous financial costs borne by taxpayers, including the millions of non-fans-but excluding the owners-to permit the ongoing expansion of this paradoxical half-socialist/half-capitalist enterprise. This book's signal contribution to our understanding of leisure, culture, and sport in America makes it highly recommended.
—Gilles Renaud

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

Michael Oriard, a former professional football player, is Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University. He is author of several books on football, most recently, Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era.

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